Roger Ebert, who died yesterday, began blogging in earnest some years back after cancer robbed him of speech. He racked up millions of hits and every post generated hundreds of comments. I’ve written about him a few times. From March of 2010:

I discovered his blog a few months ago and was enchanted – a fine writer, a profoundly human man and very very brave. He’s wasting away from cancer – can no longer speak or eat. He doesn’t even have a jaw anymore. And yet he blogs. And he cares. And he has his finger on the pulse of the humanity that is us. I wish I knew him.

Roger Ebert’s Journal was much more than movies; while he chronicled the challenges of his illness he also wrote – always elegantly – of so many other things – of politics, music, art, children and cooking.

He and I were born in the same year, so when he wrote of his own youth, which he often did – as often happens with those battling terminal illnesses – I went back in time with him. Like in this passage from a very recent post titled “How I am a Roman Catholic”:

The nuns at St. Mary’s were Dominicans. They lived in a small square convent behind the school, holding six nuns (some taught two grades) and a cook and their housekeeping nun, who kept a sharp eye trained on us through her screen door. We had humble playground equipment, a swing set and two basketball hoops. Our principal sport was playing King of the World. This involved two boys standing on a log, each trying to push the other off. The housekeeper would open the screen door and shout, “If you break your necks, you have only yourselves to blame.”

It was from these nuns, especially Sister Nathan and Sister Rosanne, that I learned my core moral and political principles. I assumed they were Roman Catholic dogma. Many of them involved a Social Contract between God and man, which represented classical liberalism based on empathy and economic fairness. We heard much of Leo XIII’s encyclical “Rerum Novarum”–“On Capital and Labor.”

I’ll miss him and his writing but I’ll go back now and again to the archives. There is wisdom there.

Anyone who has read down the entire cast list of the movie Lincoln bumped into this mysterious bit of casting trivia: Kevin Kline appeared in the film as a ‘wounded soldier’. The real Kevin Kline. (The headshot in the cast list at Imdb.com is indeed Kline and even his own Imdb page lists the credit. )

I’ve been googling about the interwebs but can find no reference to this odd and utterly delightful bit of information. (I just saw the movie, but didn’t know to look for him; there were, predictably enough, many many ‘wounded soldiers’. And a lot of dead ones. Splendid movie by the way.)

The film heads his list of the 20 Most Unbearable Movies of 2011, each receiving the Annual Rotten Banana Awards.

Other films earning the disgraceful designation include: “Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star,” which won the Slimy Pornification Award for its lewdness; “A Good Old Fashioned Orgy,” which received the Abhorrent Sexcapade Award; “The Skin I Live In,” which earned the Lurid Transgender Abuse Award; and “Happy Feet Two,” which was given the Environmentalist Hysteria Award.

“Most of these movies made very little money,” Dr. Baehr noted, “which shows the good taste of not only the vast majority of Americans but also the vast majority of moviegoers overseas.”

“Most of these movies” have never even been heard of either, except perhaps for “Happy Feet”, the second installment in a popular children’s animated film series, which has also drawn attention from a few FOX-heads who either don’t like penguins or don’t have children. Or perhaps don’t like penguins or children.

Once again, Christians are under attack but this time dammit, they stepped up and found some low-lying fruit to blame! So take that.

Somehow, Atlas Shrugged, Part I (yes! more to look forward to!), which opens Friday, has at this writing achieved the rare feat [a 0% rating) . . . not a single critic to date, from major and minor outlet, high or lowest of low of lowbrow, likes it one bit.

(Betcha the most famous namesake of them all, Sen. Paul, likes it a lot.)

. . . she says Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is one of her “favorite movies,” that it’s “about timeless truths of America handed down to us from our forefathers and foremothers,” that it’s “wonderful” and “not pro-government, certainly, but definitely pro-American,” she must know it was written by a communist, right?

His name was Sidney Buchman. In 1951 he appeared before HUAC and admitted to being a member of the Communist Party, but refused to name anyone else. In 1952, he was subpoenaed again, but refused to honor the subpoena — much like Todd Palin did when called to testify about Troopergate.

Unlike Todd Palin, Buchman was found in contempt of Congress by a vote of 314-0. He was fined $150 and sentenced to a year in Federal penitentiary (suspended). A two-time Academy Award winner, it would be a decade before his name appeared on another American movie.